Joel Pearson, PhD

Dr. Joel Pearson is an assistant professor in the department of pharmacology and therapeutics and a scientist at CancerCare Manitoba Research Institute.

Dr. Pearson is from Haida Gwaii, a secluded set of islands off the northwest coast of British Columbia. After graduating high school, he quickly escaped this seclusion by fashioning a small boat and paddled his way to Kamloops, BC, where he completed a BSc in chemical biology at Thompson Rivers University.

Dr. Pearson then spent a year and a half in industry as an LC-MS/MS instrument operator at an environmental testing lab before pursuing graduate work at the University of Alberta. There, his PhD focused on understanding the molecular basis of the pediatric lymphoma, ALK+ Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma.

This work sparked Dr. Pearson’s passion for cancer research, and he became fascinated by the idea that most oncogenic events are highly context specific and only transform certain cell types.

This interest led him to pursue postdoctoral work at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, ON.

The goal of his postdoctoral work was to understand how cellular context influences transformation and genesis of aggressive neuroendocrine cancers, such as small cell lung cancer and drug-resistant neuroendocrine prostate cancer.

He not only uncovered a key feature influencing this, but also a fundamental aspect of cancer biology that pivots on contrasting activities of a single transcriptional complex.

The transcriptional coactivators, YAP and TAZ, are oncogenes in many solid cancers, but Dr. Pearson discovered that they are instead tumor suppressors in many neural, neuroendocrine and hematological cancers.

He extended these surprising results, demonstrating that cancers can be functionally stratified into binary classes – either “YAPon” or “YAPoff” – based on distinct expression and functions of YAP/TAZ.

Importantly, these classes exhibit distinct therapeutic vulnerabilities and lineage plasticity allows cancers to switch classes to drive drug resistance.

Dr. Pearson was recruited to CancerCare Manitoba and the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2022 where his research program will focus on understanding how to expolit fundamental aspects of cancer biology to develop better cancer therapeutics, particularly for aggressive neural and neuroendocrine cancers.

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Toronto (2013 - 2022)
• PhD (Immunology), University of Alberta (2013)
• BSc (Chemical biology), Thompson Rivers University (2005)

Awards

• CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015 – 2018)
• Alberta Cancer Foundation Graduate Studentship (2011 - 2013)
• NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship-D (2009 - 2011)
• Michael Smith Foundation for Medical Research Junior Graduate Studentship (2008)
• NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship-M (2007 – 2008)